Bluehost Reviews: All About Features, Pricing, Hosting, and Performance

Bluehost Review & Test: Bluehost is one of the largest and oldest web hosting providers in the world. The web host has nearly two decades of experience in helping users build a quality home on the web.

Bluehost is now owned by Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group), the company also behind big names in hosting like HostGator, iPage, Domain.com, and Web.com.

Bluehost has in-depth knowledge that goes far beyond that of most of its competitors. The company doesn't just know how to install WordPress and launch the dashboard, for example. Full-time developers work on the platform, and it has been directly recommended by WordPress.org since 2005.

This is our Full Bluehost Review and we are going to do an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of Bluehost. If you don't want to read the full review, we've listed Bluehost's key takeaways with our verdict right below.

Bluehost Review: All About Web Host, Features, Performance, Pros & Cons

Bluehost is one of the oldest web hosts, having been launched in 1996. It has become the biggest WordPress hosting brand over the years. It's a officially recommended WordPress hosting provider. 

With Bluehost, you never have to worry about your website slowing down, even with heavy traffic. Their 24/24 expert support is always available to help you when needed, whether by phone, email or live chat. They are ranked #1 in web hosting for small businesses.

The advantages of Bluehost include the flexibility of the hosting, the many features available, the simplicity of use and the reliability of the service. Bluehost is also very affordable and offers excellent value for money.

Cons of Bluehost are mainly related to technical support and billing. Bluehost's tech support is sometimes slow and unprofessional, and billing is a bit confusing. Additionally, Bluehost does not offer a site backup service, which may be an issue for some users.

Performance class	A+
Performance	Fast and reliable hosting
Average loading time	About 0,65 seconds
Average response time	About 23ms
Free domain	Yes. 1 free domain for the first year
SSL	Free LetsEncrypt.org SSL Certificate
1-click WordPress	Yes, included in all hosting packages
Support	24/24 support by phone, email or live chat.
Discount/promo	Registration link (Up to 70% off!)

Despite its few drawbacks, Bluehost is a reliable hosting company and offers excellent value for money. If you are looking for a reliable and affordable hosting solution, Bluehost is a great option to consider.

Now, let's dive into our in-depth Bluehost hosting review, documentation, pricing, and performance so you can decide for yourself.

Bluehost Company

Bluehost is a web hosting company that was established in 1996. It today manages more than 2 million websites worldwide. Bluehost has a long-standing relationship with the WordPress community. It is an official host recommended by WordPress.org since 2006.

Bluehost prides itself on its 24/24 customer support, excellent hosting infrastructure, and support for open source software like WordPress. Bluehost offers very competitively priced hosting plans and offers plenty of features to help users grow and manage their website.

Bluehost is a great option for beginners and advanced users. Beginner users will appreciate the simplicity of Bluehost's interface and the many tools and tutorials available to help them create and manage their website. Advanced users will appreciate the flexibility and the many configuration options available.

Features: What Makes Bluehost Stand Out?

Tl;dr: Bluehost stands out because it offers almost every web hosting service you could possibly need, including professional digital marketing services at great prices.

Bluehost is a web hosting company offering almost every service you may need, including advanced hosting like VPS, Dedicated Server, and Managed WordPress Hosting. The “managed” part means it takes care of the technical details, like updating WordPress plugins and core for you, managing security, and optimizing performance.

Bluehost is a particularly good host for small businesses because it offers digital marketing services at great prices. A few of its services: website creation, SEO, advertising, social media marketing and local business visibility.

One of the benefits of Bluehost is that it measures the progress made by small businesses so that they can see their return on investment. Plus, she provides helpful tutorials on website management, hosting, and marketing.

In short, Bluehost stands out for its full range of web hosting services, ease of use, and great prices.

Easy to use for beginners

Some of the hosts we have seen can only be considered the best if you are an advanced user. But Bluehost is also ideal for beginners.

Its customer portal is intuitive and clean (although in our experience it can be a little slow at times). You can access your site in the "My sites" section and obtain additional modules on the marketplace. Everything is very simple and the client area is very user-friendly for beginners.

If you don't want to use WordPress, you can also start building a website with a website builder (like Weebly or Drupal). You can then customize a template by simply dragging and dropping elements onto your page.

Bluehost also has features for advanced users who want to use their code to build their site.

30 Days Money Back Guarantee

Bluehost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for all of its hosting plans.

You can try the service to see how it performs for yourself and request a refund if you're not completely satisfied. However, we would like to warn you.

According to Bluehost Terms, here is what does or does not fall under this guarantee:

• You can only get a refund on the cost of web hosting, not other products like domains or other add-ons.
• Bluehost would discount $15,99 if you received a free domain name in your plan.
• Bluehost does not refund any requests after 30 days.

It's not exactly a no-questions-asked policy like we've seen with some hosts. So make sure you agree with these points before signing up.

The official web host recommended by WordPress.org

WordPress is the most used website platform on the market – ~42% of the entire Internet is built with WordPress.

We can therefore say that it is an authority in terms of hosting solutions. WordPress only officially recommends three hosting partners for use with a WordPress site:

• Bluehost
• DreamHost
• SiteGround

Of course, you can use almost any hosting provider to create a WordPress site. But the fact that Bluehost is one of the few officially recognized partners is encouraging.

Bluehost emails

You can create up to five free email accounts with your domain extension for your business. In your dashboard, you will see different menus on the left side. Click Advanced, then Email Accounts under the Email tab.

Once in the email accounts dashboard, click on the blue Create button. You will then need to enter the details for the new email account, including email address, password, storage space size and number of messages per day.

Once you've created the email account, you can use it to send and receive email as you would any other email account. You can also add additional email accounts if you need more storage space or advanced features.

Bluehost mail supports IMAP/SMTP

This means you don't have to use Bluehost's webmail interface! You can check your e-mail using other e-mail programs (such as Mailbird, Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird). Using desktop email programs will make you more productive and your emails will always be available, even offline.

24/7 customer support

Bluehost provides 24/24 customer support via live chat, phone, and email ticket system. On top of that, they have an extensive knowledge base with answers to common questions and useful information.

We tested their live chat option, and the experience was overall satisfactory.

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Performance: Loading speed and availability

Decent page load speed (420ms)

Personalized searches conducted by Google showed: “When the loading time of a page increases from 1s to 3s, the probability of bouncing increases by 32%. »

This translates to your visitors being 32% more likely to leave your site. And the situation only gets worse with longer page load times.

Also, Google is moving more towards mobile indexing. This means that your site must also be optimized for mobile users, otherwise you lose traffic.

Either way, a slow website almost always means less traffic and, therefore, less sales. So, right after uptime, page load time is the second most important thing that can make or break the success of your website.

Our test site with Bluehost offered an average load speed of 420ms over the past six months. It's not the fastest speed we've seen from other hosts, but it's still enough to keep visitors on your site. Moreover, they improved their loading time month by month.

Good uptime (99,98%)

Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web host. After all, if your site is down, your users cannot access it. Therefore, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking for hosting services.

After reviewing many hosts, our benchmark for “good” uptime is between 99,91% and 99,93%. Ideally, we don't want to see less than that.

The good news is that Bluehost easily exceeds this threshold, comfortably keeping our test site online for 99,98% of the time for the past six months. Total downtime was one hour. There were a few bad months (May and July 2022) where uptime was below average, but overall Bluehost kept our site up and running without any major outages.

http://stats.pingdom.com/zp1kq4gopbjs/3292804/history

Hosting plans and prices

Bluehost offers a variety of hosting plans for all budgets and sizes. This includes shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and more. Let's take a look at Bluehost hosting plans and their features.

• Shared hosting : Shared hosting is the perfect way to start a new website with a low volume of traffic. In a shared hosting environment, your website shares server resources with other websites.
• Cloud Hosting : A more reliable upgrade from the shared hosting plan. It allows you to use multiple cloud servers, allowing your website to automatically switch to another server in the event of hardware failure or high traffic.
• WordPress Hosting: Their WordPress plans are designed specifically for WordPress powered websites. They are optimized to run WordPress and can even protect your WordPress site against common threats.
• WooCommerce Hosting: WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, it allows you to easily create an online store with WordPress. WooCommerce hosting gives you all the essential features to launch your online store.
• VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server): An upgrade from shared WordPress hosting, VPS hosting allows you to have dedicated virtual resources in a shared environment.
• Dedicated hosting server: A dedicated server hosting for your website means that you will have all the server resources dedicated to you. The downside is that you will have to manage the server on your own.

All Bluehost hosting plans allow you to install WordPress in 1 click. 

All plans come with an easy-to-use hosting control panel where you can manage your hosting, create databases, and more.

Bluehost has a custom control panel that improves ease of use for beginners. Bluehost has a custom control panel that makes it easy for beginners to use. It also uses a customized version of the cPanel hosting dashboard for more advanced options.

Bluehost Pricing

Bluehost offers four types of hosting plans: shared, WordPress, VPS, and dedicated. The prices of the different packages range from $2,75 to $119,99, with a term of 36 months. You can opt for an entry-level shared hosting package or a high-end dedicated server, depending on your needs. 

• Shared ($2,95 – $13,95 per month)
• WordPress ($2,75 – $13,95 per month)
• VPS ($18,99 – $59,99 per month)
• Dedicated ($17,99 – $119,99 per month)

Among the most popular options offered by Bluehost, you will certainly find the one that best meets your expectations.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting allows multiple users to share space on a single server managed by hosting provider Bluehost. A shared hosting plan can include several offers or combinations of features offered by the host. Bluehost shared hosting is perfect for blogs, hobbies, and small business websites.

Specification	BASIC	PLUS	Choice PLUS	PRO
Server Specs
CPU performance	Standard	Standard	Standard	Optimized
WebsiteSpace	10 GB	20 GB	40 GB	100 GB
Max File Count	200,000	200,000	200,000	300,000
bandwidth	unmetered	unmetered	unmetered	unmetered
Database
MySQL Databases	20	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Max Database Size	5 GB	5 GB	5 GB	5 GB
Max Database Usage	10 GB	10 GB	10 GB	10 GB
Max Database Tables	5000	5000	5000	5000
Max Concurrent MySQL	150	150	150	150
Marketing
Google Ads/Bing Credits	—	$200	$200	$200
Spam Experts	No	1 Domain	1 Domain	2 Domains
Domains
Free domain	1 Year	1 Year	1 Year	1 Year
Primary Domains Allowed	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Parked Domains	5	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
SubDomains	25	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Paid Add-ons
Premium SSL Certificate	No	No	No	PositiveSSL
Automated Backups	No	No	Included 1st Year	Included

VPS

Dedicated servers

What are the pros and cons of Bluehost?

Bluehost is popular for its plethora of hosting options and features that are great for most types of websites, but there are some downsides with billing, technical support, and more. Consider the following pros and cons of choosing Bluehost as your website hosting solution.

Benefits

1. Very popular : Bluehost has over 2 million sites under its control.
2. Many accommodation options: Bluehost offers various options including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers.
3. Simple upgrades: We loved how easy it is to switch from one Bluehost hosting plan to another – just open a support ticket and the team will take care of migrating your site to a new server without any hassle. break time.
4. Free anti-spam solutions: Anti-spam tools keep your site secure. We found these features easy to configure in cPanel.
5. Built-in Cloudflare support: Cloudflare can speed up your site load times by using regional facilities to host and load key website files.
6. Digital security features included: All accounts at Bluehost come with digital security tools including SSL, SiteLock protection, and options for unique IPs.
7. A 30-day money-back guarantee: If you are not satisfied with the services offered by Bluehost, you can get a full refund no questions asked.
8. A 99% uptime guarantee: According to our tests, its systems run smoothly 99% of the time, but having this warranty should put your mind at rest.

The inconvenients

1. No automatic daily backup: The biggest downside we found is that it doesn't run automatic daily backups.
2. No monthly billing on shared hosting: Although the prices for its shared hosting services are very affordable (starting at just $2,95/month), you have to pay for at least a year at a time.
3. Longer wait times for technical support: Users have reported longer than normal wait times for technical support, especially during peak hours.
4. Migration costs from another host: If you already have your website with another host, you can DIY it or Bluehost will charge you to migrate it to their servers for you.
5. No Windows Hosting: Bluehost only offers Linux-based hosting solutions, so if you prefer Windows, you'll have to work with another company.
6. Higher domain renewal price

Is Bluehost better than GoDaddy?

When looking for a web host, there are many factors to consider. The quality of service, the price and the features offered are among the most important. Two of the most popular hosts are Bluehost and GoDaddy. So which is the best?

When comparing Bluehost and GoDaddy, it's important to note that both hosts have strengths and weaknesses. Bluehost is generally considered one of the best web hosts, especially for beginners. However, GoDaddy is also a popular option, especially because of its ease of use.

When choosing a web host, it's important to make sure you're getting what you need. Bluehost offers a range of features, including reliable customer support, reasonable introductory and renewal prices, and solid security. GoDaddy also offers a variety of features, including 24/7 customer support, built-in website building tools, and flexible payment options.

So which is the best web host? It depends on your needs. If you are looking for a reliable web host with advanced features, Bluehost is a great option. If you prefer a simpler solution, GoDaddy may be a better option.

Read also: 15 Best Website Monitoring Tools in 2022 (Free and Paid)

Conclusion: Our Verdict

Bluehost is one of the leading web hosting providers and offers a full range of web hosting services. Bluehost conforms to all modern hardware and software standards. They are constantly striving for excellence by regularly improving their server hardware infrastructure as well as the overall hosting experience. In an effort to make building a website easier for beginners, Bluehost has revamped its dashboard.

Bluehost hosting plans are affordable and have been designed to meet the needs of any type of website. Bluehost also offers a variety of advanced features for power users. Additionally, Bluehost offers tools and services to make website management easier.

Thus, Bluehost is a great option for beginners and experienced users. They offer a full range of web hosting services at affordable prices. Additionally, Bluehost offers tools and services to make website management easier.

The reviews on Bluehost are quite positive. Bluehost has performed slightly better in the past, but it still offers reliable service with decent server speeds. Plus, it offers strong security options, an excellent money-back guarantee, lots of user-friendly apps, and multiple tiers of hosting packages to suit different customers. Pricing starts at $2,75/month with our special discount.

Still, Bluehost isn't perfect. Renewal rates for hosting plans increase significantly after the initial sign-up period, and the cheapest plan has a few critical restrictions from subsequent tiers.

But overall, Bluehost offers decent performance and good value for money. We therefore recommend Bluehost as a web host.